McCLAREN & CO COURT NAPPING!
Baker-Richardson KO’s QPR and can now start catching up on his sleep after red-card debut
COURTNEY Baker Richardson put QPR to sleep and reckons he can now look forward to a decent kip himself.
The young Swansea striker scored his first goal for the club after returning from suspension following a red card on his debut at Millwall. That dismissal – just four minutes into his first professional start, for a clumsy lunge at James Meredith – meant hours of bedtime ceiling analysis. “There have been a lot of sleepless nights, I’m not going to lie,” admitted Baker Richardson, who moved from non-league Leamington a year ago. “To have only four minutes on the pitch is not a good reflection on me. I tried my hardest and tried to impress, but I’ve come back stronger and hopefully I’ve proved a couple of people wrong. It means a lot to me.
“I appreciated the gaffer keeping his faith in me and I’m just happy to get on the scoresheet with my first Championship goal. Hopefully, there are many more to come.”
Baker-Richardson, 22, is raw and unschooled but his enthusiasm and energy combines well with the more thoughtful Oli McBurnie up front for the Swans.
It was McBurnie’s selflessness that created further goals for Connor Roberts and Jay Fulton, although Baker-Richardson admitted he still has much to learn, including the modern methods of managers like Graham Potter.
“The reaction of Graham after the red card wasn’t what I expected. I expected to get panned out of my head or punched,” he said.
“He wasn’t like that at all and he and the players got behind me. They could have given me a good rollicking, but they helped me 100 per cent. Once you take some confidence from your first goal, you normally avalanche into a scoring spree.
“Touch wood, it goes that way for me.”
The Swans had not scored a goal for almost 300 minutes, which meant Rangers, more leaky than your average water company, were perfect opposition.
Hoops boss Steve McClaren has problems at both ends of the pitch and said: “We’ve got goalscorers in the team and eventually we will start scoring goals because the players I’ve got have proven that in the past.
“But we need to be more clinical with our pass and finish. We had a poor start to the season because we were short of players. We had to be patient and got two strikers in eventually. They’re playing catch up.”